House Armed Services Committee member Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) announced over the weekend that she will seek the Democratic nomination for president of the United States in the 2020 elections.
“I have decided to run and will be making a formal announcement within the next week,” Gabbard said Saturday in response to CNN’s Van Jones’ query about her plans to run for the presidency in 2020.
“There are a lot of challenges that are facing the American people that I am concerned about and that I want to help solve,” she said, adding that her one main issue is “war and peace.”
“I look forward to being able to get into this and to talk about it in depth when we make our announcement,” she continued.
Gabbard, 37, was first elected to the House in 2012 and represents Hawaii’s 2nd congressional district, encompassing the rural/suburban parts of Oahu as well as the rest of the state. She enlisted in the Hawaii Army National Guard in 2003 and volunteered in 2004 for a 12-month tour in Iraq with the 29th Support battalion medical company.
Gabbard graduated from the Accelerated Officer Candidate School at the Alabama Military Academy in 2007, and volunteered for a second tour in 2008, this time for 10 months in Kuwait. She continues to serve as a major in the Hawaii Army National Guard.
Since joining Congress, she has served on the House Armed Services Committee’s (HASC) readiness and emerging threats and capabilities subcommittees, as well as the House Foreign Committee subcommittees on Asia and the Pacific as well as the Middle East and North Africa. HASC committee rosters for the 116th Congress have not yet been released.
In 2017, Gabbard introduced bill H.R. 258 to prohibit the use of U.S. funds to provide assistance to terrorist groups including Al Qaeda, Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and to countries supporting those organizations directly or indirectly. She has been criticized for her decision to meet with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad during a January 2017 visit to the country.
She received $7,898 in campaign contributions from individuals in the defense sector in the 2018 midterm cycle, according to the not-for-profit Center for Responsive Politics in Washington, D.C. She has received $149,210 from defense-related contractors since first running for Congress, with Lockheed Martin [LMT] contributing $24,000 from its PAC since 2011. Defense contractors collectively spent $38,000 in PAC funds on Gabbard’s first reelection campaign in 2014, and $63,500 on her campaign in the 2016 cycle.
Gabbard joins Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.,) a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC), as an early contender for the Democratic nominee for the 2020 presidential election. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), who serves with Warren on SASC, is widely expected to announce her candidacy in the coming weeks.